The present invention generally relates to a collaborative system for sharing applications between computers, and in particular, to a method and apparatus for managing display palettes in collaborative systems. Many computer programs use as many colors as are available from the computer's video subsystem to allow the programs to have as much visual impact as possible. This is fine when displaying a computer program on one system, because the computer program has full control over the system, but special techniques had to be developed to allow the computer program to be displayed identically when shown simultaneously on many computers.